Rihanna's made their reunion official, with the pronouncement that "I'll handle it". Anyone else feeling very uneasy?

She has managed, at the age of 24, to have been named by Time magazine as one of the most influential people in the world.

Since moving from Barbados to the US at just 16 she has stormed to international music stardom, become an industry in her own right and has a GDP bigger than some countries. She earned £33.4m in 2011 alone.

She's the biggest-selling digital artist in the USA, the most popular person on all of Facebook, and has sold 58million singles last time anyone counted.

Not bad for a girl who used to help her crack addict dad sell second-hand clothes from a street stall. Not bad at all. If the rest of the world had the gumption to exploit their talents like Rihanna has it would be a very different, and more fabulous, place.

So, she's a grown-up. She's been around, she's seen some stuff, and I don't begrudge her a single private jet or diva demand for six foot white couches in her dressing room. Knock yourself out, Rihanna, you've earned it.

But like everyone else on Earth who's had fabulous luck and wealth from a young age, she's none too clever about what she does with it.

So she piles out of nightclubs - quite sober - flashing her nipples and nethers. She appears on tea-time family-oriented TV programmes in hotpants and strapless bra, grinding her pelvis at the cameras. She posts naked pictures of herself on Twitter.

Now, she's an adult, she can do all that if she wants. The great thing about feminism is that she has a choice about how to behave, and if that's her choice she can. I wish she'd choose to promote something other than herself now and again - a charity, say - but I expect she'll get as bored of it as the rest of us, eventually.

And likewise she is old enough to make up her own mind about who her boyfriends are. Her fans are split at the moment between people who adore her no matter what and those who loathe her ex Chris Brown, who battered her senseless in 2009 and is now back together with her.

Allow me to remind you what happened. Rihanna says while driving home from a night out with Chris she got a misfired booty call text from a girl intended for him, and they argued.

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On stage together, the year before Chris attacked her

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Her decision.. but is there any possible world where this is the right one?

She said: ""I caught him in a lie. I was being more annoyed at that point in our relationship he had to lie about something so stupid, I couldn't take that he kept lying to me. And he couldn't take that I wouldn't drop it. And ... it was ugly."

Ugly doesn't quite cover it. While driving along Chris punched her repeatedly in the face. The police report said she had bite marks on her arms. She told how she tried to fend him off with her feet. When she tried to ring her assistant for help, he threatened to kill her.

Worse was this, which she told to US interviewer Diane Sawyer afterwards: "The thing that men don't realise, when they hit a woman ... the face, the broken arm, the black eye, it's going to heal. That's not the problem. It's the scar inside."

"You flash back. You remember it all the time."

Brown, then 19, was convicted of felony assault and sentenced to 1,400 hours of community service, domestic violence counselling, and five years of probation. The judge also imposed a 'stay away' order requiring him to stay 50 yards away from Rihanna.

When Brown applied in 2011 for that order to be lifted, Rihanna backed him. She started talking about how she still loved him, and in October last year he finally finished with his Rihanna-lookalike girlfriend and rumours began circulating he was back with his ex. The pair of them teased their fans with constant Instagram updates of their cuddles and bedcovers, so it's little surprise they're now official.

What is a surprise is that Rihanna told Rolling Stone magazine: "If it's a mistake, it's my mistake. After being tormented for so many years I'd rather just live my truth and take the backlash. I can handle it."

Doesn't sound like the same woman, does it? And it's interesting she thinks public disapproval of her actions equates to a beating, and that she's prepared to take it.

She's quite right when she says it's nobody's business but hers who she goes out with, and just because those of us with more than three self-obsessed brain cells to rub together might take a different path doesn't mean she's wrong.

Domestic violence has a thousand different causes, but one of the biggies is if they've done it before, to someone else or to you. Hitting somebody is shocking the first time, and the person who does it gets an immediate kick of control and then regret.

The second time the sorrow is less, and he or she needs to hit harder to get the same sense of control.

When it happened to me, it began with a shove. It became being shoved into walls, then picked up and shaken, then dragged around by an arm or a leg. As Rihanna rightly said those bruises quickly heal, but it leaves a weakness inside which means that these days I refuse, point blank, to ever be in a similar situation again.

I don't argue passionately with people, like I used to - I am clipped, civil, quiet. I avoid commitment because I don't want a man living in my home, where I feel safe. If a boyfriend gets angry about something, he never sees me again.

Not long ago when I finished with someone and he took it badly, I worried he'd hide outside my house and attack me - and he had never given me the least cause for concern. He was a nice guy, and the only reason I was frightened of him was because someone else had scared me.

I'm sure Rihanna's telling the truth when she says: "It's different now. We don't have those type of arguments any more... we value each other. I can't say nothing else will ever go wrong but I'm pretty solid in the knowing he's disgusted by that."

The trouble is Rihanna thinks she faces just one problem - Chris Brown's fists.

Seeing as he was involved in a six-man brawl over a parking space, smashed a window after journalists asked him about beating Rihanna, witnessed his own mother being beaten by his stepdad, and still has a year of probation left after smacking her last time, it's fairly likely this is an issue she's going to come nose-to-knuckle with in the near future.

But she knows that, and she's a grown-up, and it's her mistake.

What she perhaps doesn't realise, because she's forgotten it since she told Diane Sawyer the same damn thing, is that there is a second, uglier problem and that is her mental scars.

You can't put arnica on those babies. There's no splint or bandage can fix a broken heart or a doubting mind. Just as I flinched at nothing, so will she.

When Chris is passionate about something, she'll decide it's best to join in. If he gets angry, she'll keep her head down. If there's a misfired text again, she'll want, desperately, to believe his excuses. She'll bend further and further back in order to avoid history repeating itself, and in doing so give him all the control he wants with none of the thrill involved in getting it by beating.

He'll get frustrated she's being so good, he'll behave worse to provoke her, and one day one of them will snap.

Even if that never happens - even if they're one of the rare couples who manage to counsel and talk their way through it and avoid it ever happening again the rest of their lives - at the back of her mind she'll be waiting for him to punch her.

Every day, whether he does it or not. Because you flash back, and you remember it all the time.

There is only one cure for someone who's been assaulted by the person they love most in the whole world - and that is to love someone else.

Perhaps, after 50 years of a better guy proving you have no need to worry, a former victim can forget they need to worry at all.

I haven't managed it yet - and it sounds like Rihanna hasn't even started.

* If you need help to spot the warning signs or help a friend suffering domestic abuse, visit the Refuge website here
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